D H

You don't have to shout (or use bold). I would however like it very much if you would try to write more clearly, and do so with fewer spelling and grammar errors. The problem with your concept is here: What are you talking about what does women have do with space cost? Throwing money and people at a problem does not guarantee a faster result. Often, just the opposite is true. That example of one woman taking nine months to have a baby exemplifies this issue. Adding resources does not help reduce that nine month interval. This is the problem of the Mythical Man-Month (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month). While the Mythical Man-Month addresses the specific problem of software project management, this is a must-read book for technical project managers of every sort. Just a couple of take-away points: Adding money and resources to a late project makes the project even later, and prematurely adding money and resources to an exploratory project is a recipe for failure. To solve some technical problem, it just doesn't make sense to throw lots of resources at the problem until after the basic kinks have been identified and resolved. Consider the Manhattan Project and the Apollo Program. The Manhattan Project started as a small project in 1939 and didn't balloon to become a huge project until 1942. The basic science was developed during the two+ year interval between Einstein's letter and the official start of the project in 1942. Even with that, the project eventually cost more than ten times the initial cost estimate. Had the project not been utterly black (Congress was clueless about its existence) it would never have gone anywhere. Most of the basic science and technology of getting people to the Moon were similarly fairly well understood at the onset of the Apollo Program. The US had been launching rockets, with some success (and some failures), for a good number of years. We had been putting people in very hostile environments for even longer (think submarines). The goals were clear, and where the technology wasn't well-known (navigation, rendezvous and docking, landing on the Moon to name a few), the roadmap to resolving those problems was fairly easy to see. Because of this (and because Congress was aware of every cent going to the program), the Apollo program overran its initial 1961 budget by only 7%. You are asking for something very different. The goals are a bit fuzzier and the technology to achieve those goals is unknown. Throwing immense amounts money at the project (something that cannot happen given the current economy and the current governments in the space faring nations) will guarantee one thing: The program will be canceled in just a few years with nothing worthy coming of it. Sorry to be blunt, but that is the way R&D works. You don't throw big chunks of money at a problem until the timing is right. The timing is not right for space colonies and space mining. You are asking for a magic bullet to solve the problem of making space colonies and space mining feasible. There is no such magic bullet, and wishing for one will not make that magic bullet suddenly appear out of thin air. Throwing money at people to find that magic bullet will not work for the reasons cited above. Just because something is easy in a science fiction movie does not mean it is easy in reality. The main problem here is that you have false expectations of what is achievable. Stop looking at things from the perspective of what movie directors can accomplish using props galore, lots of computer graphics, and freedom from the laws of physics. Look instead at Space X, Scaled Composites/Virgin Galactic, Orbital Sciences Corporation, and maybe even the tried-and-true aerospace companies who are feeling a lot of pressure from these newcomers. There is, right at this very moment, a whole lot in the offing in terms of space exploration if you look at things from a realistic perspective.

For now, that is. I wouldn't be surprised if one of the outcomes of the Arizona tragedy is an attempt by the government to clamp down on internet speech. That has nothing to do with whether we evil owners, administrators, moderators, and science experts at Science Forums suppress your non-existant right to freedom of speech on this site. It has everything to do with your right to freedom of speech on a site or blog of your own making.

Aside: Your writing would be a lot easier to read if you put some time into learning to write well. Watch for misspelled words (most browsers highlight them for you) and please learn how to use punctuation. If your native language is something other than English, it would help if you would try a little harder. If your native language is English, shame on you. Back on topic: That most countries do not have space programs is irrelevant. It is as simple as I said (show us the money). You are implicitly demanding a huge increase in spending. Developing new technologies costs a lot. Rocket scientists don't come cheap, and labs, test facilities, and fabrication facilities all outfitted with appropriate equipment are extremely expensive. Fine. Let those future generations solve those problems. It is just plain silly to develop (as opposed to researching) technologies now that won't be used for another 50 years or more. NASA, along with the US Department of Defense, Rokosmos, ESA, JAXA, etc., are researching technologies beyond chemical propulsion. They are not pouring huge amounts of money into it for a bunch of reasons. They don't have the money, for one thing. For another, at some point pouring monies into research is equivalent to pouring that money down the drain. It takes one woman nine months to have a baby. Adding extra women to the task does not shorten the time. Your pipe dream of space colonies, space mining, etc right now? No, it can't.

Fine. Convince your congress critters to ante up, and ante up a lot. It would be good to remember that for almost 40 years now, NASA has been running on 1/10 or less the budget they had in the Apollo era. It would also be good to remember that right now, the government is in a huge financial bind and will not ante up. They are looking instead to cut everything except for Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, and Defense. (In other words, they are looking to cut anything and everything except for the three things that really matter, but that is a different story.) That everything includes NASA.

Strictly speaking, the Earth and Moon orbit one another about their common center of mass. The center of mass of the Earth-Moon system is not at the center of the Earth. It is about 2/3 Earth radii from the center of the Earth (i.e., it is still inside the Earth). The Earth-Moon system together orbit the Sun. The largest planet in the solar system is Jupiter. Thus one can roughly say that the Sun and Jupiter orbit their common center of mass. The center of mass of the Sun-Jupiter system is slightly outside the surface of the Sun. It is even better is to say that the Sun orbits the solar system barycenter (center of mass). The Sun is a single star. It more or less orbits the Milky Way. However, when the Sun goes through one of the arms of the galaxy this changes the Sun's orbit about the Milky Way by quite a bit.

THat is exactly why I have taken umbrage at your opening statement that "the space program we have is a joke." You don't know rocket science, and yet you are somehow qualified to make judgments of the quality of our programs? Give me a break. NASA and DoD have developed a nomenclature, the technology readiness level (wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_readiness_level), for establishing how close some proposed technology is to being useful. One problem I have seen is that purveyors of technology have no clue what this scale means. For example, that NASA has conducted a couple of experiments (failures) with tethered satellites does not mean that the deployment of the space elevator is at TRL 6. Those experiments (a) were failures and (b) used a tether that was about 20 km long; the space elevator is a tether that is about 40,000 km long. That the tether is more than three orders of magnitude longer than anything dealt with outside of paper studies is one huge problem that will need to be overcome with a space elevator. That the tether experiments to date have been less than successful is yet another issue. Whether carbon nanotubes will suffice in reality (as opposed to as on paper) is yet another. The space elevator is at a very low technology readiness level, and the path to a higher level is not at all clear. The same goes for the other technologies proposed in this thread. As for the nuclear light bulb: You know how some movies are in the category of "so bad they're good"? That is the nuclear light bulb.

No, the space program is not doomed. Just your visions for achieving something akin to Star Trek or Star Wars in the immediate future.

I have asked before for a citation. I am asking again. The money has to be significant (NASA does invest small amounts in crackpot ideas; see below), not an SBIR, and current. Yes, they do. The amount of money given to crackpots in the heyday of the Apollo program was quite astounding. NASA has, multiple times, had a Crackpot Ideas Office. It was never called that officially, but that is exactly what it was called by everyone but the tiny number of crackpots who got funded by it. The last incarnation was the Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project (canceled, Oct 1 2008). The rationale apparently was that while the odds of any kind of return on investment was very small, a small investment into fringe and even crackpot ideas was worthwhile because of the potential for a huge return. The office keeps disappearing because the money spent, however small, is best spent elsewhere. NASA still does fund the occasional fringy concept through its SBIR/STTR program and through other small programs. The sums are very, very small, by government standards.

Read post #36. Also, it is not my job to debunk something, especially some stupid video. Science and engineering does not work that way. The burden of proof falls on the person making the proposal rather than on a reviewer. Find a paper on this in some peer-reviewed journal, please. Also note that just because something is published in a peer-reviewed journal does not necessarily mean that the science and engineering is solid. A lot of junk does get past peer review. Getting some idea published is the first step in science, not the last. A good step for you would be to get some education in the field. That you don't know why a laser wouldn't work to heat the air once an object gets into space is rather telling -- and rather galling. It takes a lot of gall to say that our space program is a joke when you know next to nothing about getting into space.

It's a flippin' video from History channel or something similar, NEC. Scientists and engineers don't do videos. We do papers. Crackpots do videos.

If this is what you are pinning your hopes on for the future of the space program, the joke is on you.

How do you know that Silverman can't explain tides? His explanation may well have been edited out. While I can explain the tides, had I been in Silverman's place debating O'Reilly my initial take would have been the same as Silverman's: "Tides go in, tides go out???" My second take might well have been the same, as well. It would have taken a while for it to sink in that O'Reilly was truly making the argument that science can't explain the tides. Another possibility is of course that Silverman cannot explain the tides, that he was a liberal arts major. Are you saying that liberal arts majors are not qualified to be atheists?

It is quite different. The difference is that one is rejecting a specific instance of a supernatural being while strict atheism rejects all instances. There is a huge gap between a specific quantifier versus a universal quantifier.

The question is nonsense. You are asking what physics says will happen after something currently deemed to be physically impossible happens. Because stars don't instantly disappear, there is no physically plausible answer to your question.

I can't even remember the last time I watched MSNBC, so no, I am not a great advocate of the Mr. Ed Show, whatever that is. I do however watch Fox quite often. Bret Baier, Shepard Smith, Greta Van Susteren are pretty good. Things go downhill from there. O'Reilly used to be pretty good, but he has become a pinheaded patriot as of late. His penchant for arguing with atheists and the incredibly bad god of the gaps style arguments he uses in those debates are exemplary of his slide. Whether O'Reilly has lots of money is irrelevant. There are lots of ways to make lots of money, and morality, legality, and correctness has little to do with it. If anything I suspect that a person with a penchant for morality, legality, and correctness has significantly reduced odds of making oodles of money compared to someone with no such scruples. I'm not saying that O'Reilly came by his money by being immoral or performing illegal acts. I'm just saying that the fact that he makes a huge amount of money is not an indicator of the correctness of his arguments.

No, it doesn't. The question was about floating point representation. Before I talk about floating point representations, it is worth noting that two's complement is but one of several alternative schemes for representing integers (positive and negative) in a computer. Other techniques include one's complement, excess-n, and signed magnitude. Each of these is in a sense easier to understand than two's complement. One's complement: Represent the number, sans the sign, in binary, and flip each bit. Voila! One's complement. Signed magnitude: Reserve one bit as the sign bit, typically 0=positive, 1=negative. The remaining bits represent the magnitude of the number. One problem with this scheme: Negative zero and positive zero are different numbers as far as representation goes. They are of course the same number as far as mathematics is concerned. Excess-n: To represent a number in excess-n notation, just add the offset n. For example, with n=1023, 0 becomes 1023, 1 becomes 1024, ..., and 1024 becomes 2047. For negative numbers, -1 becomes 1022, -2 becomes 1021, ..., and -1023 becomes 0. Note that this excess-1023 notation lets us represent numbers from -1023 to 1024 in eleven bits (0 to 2047). Both signed magnitude and excess-n are employed in the most common representation of floating point numbers, the IEEE floating point standard. Before I delve into that, I'm going to review scientific notation first. 1.1 in scientific notation is 1.1×100, 9,876.54321 is 9.87654321×103. This representation is not unique. The number 9,876.54321 can be represented in scientific notation a number of ways: 9,876.54321×100, 987.654321×101, etc. The representation with a single digit to the left of the decimal point, 9.87654321×103, is the normalized representation. One last thing to note: Not all fractions can be represented so cleanly. Some fractions such 243/7 have a repeating decimal. In scientific notation, 243/7 is 3.4714285(714285)...×103, where the (714285)... indicates that the 714285 keeps on repeating in the decimal representation. There is nothing special about base 10. We could use base 2 instead of base 10. With this, one becomes 1.0×20 in binary notation while 210=102 becomes 1.0×21 and 310=112 becomes 1.1×21. What about fractions? 2½ (base 10) is 1.01×21. Just as some fractions have a repeating decimal, some fractions have a repeating binary. 1/10 (base 10) is one such number. 1/1010 in binary is 0.000110011(0011)... Thus 1.110 can also be represented as 1.000110011(0011)...×20. What about 3.110? This can be represented in binary as 101.000110011(0011)...×20, 10.1000110011(0011)...×21, or 1.01000110011(0011)...×22. The same normalization concept used in base 10 scientific notation can also be used for base 2. In base 10, the leading digit was 1, 2, ..., or 9. In base 2, the leading digit of any non-zero number represented in normalized binary notation always 1. This means we don't really need to represent that leading digit, assuming the number is normalized. The leading 1 is implied by the fact that the number is in normalized form. So, finally, how to represent floating point numbers on a computer, in steps: Represent the number in normalized binary notation, ±1×1.(fractional part)×2exponent. One of the bits in the computer representation will be used for the sign, a number of bits for the exponent, and the remaining bits for the fractional part. The exponent is represented in excess-n notation. Excess-127 is used for single precision numbers, excess-1023 for double precision. The fractional part is a string of bits, with the initial bit representing 1/2, the next 1/4, and so on. Single precision uses 23 bits, double precision, 52 bits. So how to represent 1.110? Step 1, 1.110=+1.0001100110011001100110011001100110011001100110011001(1001)...×20. Step 2, the exponent is zero, which becomes 01111112 in excess-127 notation and 01111111112 in excess-1023 notation. Step 3, the fractional part is 0001100110011001100110011001100110011001100110011001(1001)... The first 23 bits are 00011001100110011001100 (followed by 1100...) while the first 52 bits are 0001100110011001100110011001100110011001100110011001 (followed by 1001...). Note that in both cases the first discarded bit is 1. Thus it would be better to represent the 23 bit fractional part as 00011001100110011001101 and the 52 bit fractional part as 0001100110011001100110011001100110011001100110011010. Step 4, start to put it all together. Using 0 to represent positive numbers and 1 negative, the single precision representation of 1.1 is 0 0111111 00011001100110011001101 while the double precision representation is 0 0111111111 0001100110011001100110011001100110011001100110011010. One final step, omitted, is to complete step 4. That varies with the endianness of a computer.

Is it so ridiculous? The level of intransigence and vitriol in this country has risen to an extremely high level as of late, and it is the kooks from both sides who are driving this. More or less equal and rather sizable fractions of the left and right see the last/current President as illegitimate and as hellbent on destroying the country. "Compromise" was a dirty word in the last Congress appears to be a dirty word for the new Congress. Some of the political outcomes I would not be surprised to see are more restrictive gun laws and some kind of clampdown on the internet. The internet is where the crazies get a lot of their ideas and their perceived legitimacy.

Post #12/#13 is almost certainly the answer the teacher was looking for.

You haven't listened much to O'Reilly, Hannity, Limbaugh, et al, have you? We scientists and engineers are useless idiots to them. While we do spout utter nonsense such as a scientific explanation of the tides, we do create these neat tools that they use to spread their version of the truth ... or at least what little bit of the truth that their little minds can comprehend.

See posts #12 and #13.

No. You take the other door. If you can only take the door that the guardian answers with, you need to ask "What would the other guardian's answer be to the question 'What door would leads to sudden death'?"

"What would the other guardian's answer be to the question 'What door would leads to a long and rewarding life'?"

Suppose you use a very precise gravimeter to accurately measure the acceleration due to gravity all over the Earth. Suppose that after doing this you find that the average value, however you define "average", differs from 9.80665 meters/second2 (which it almost certainly will). Will that finding change the value of what we call "standard gravity"? No. You don't measure standard gravity. "Standard gravity" is exactly 9.80665 meters/second2, by definition.

Suppose an atheist goes to a church and, in the middle of the sermon, starts shouting loudly that the God the parishioners worship is a fraud. Or suppose a fundamentalist goes to a meeting of some atheist organization and starts shouting loudly that the members will burn in Hell. Neither has any right to freedom of speech in those venues. The only expectation either one should have is that they will be tossed, maybe vigorously, that they may be arrested for disturbing the peace, and that they may be sued for harassment. Your right to freedom of speech ends at the moment you leave the public sidewalk. Once you enter private property you have no such rights. Even on the public sidewalk your rights are not absolute. If you make a lot of noise at 1AM in a neighborhood you can be arrested for disturbing the peace. If you and a whole bunch of people get together to hold some protest at 1PM but do not obtain the necessary permit the whole lot of you can be arrested for disturbing the peace. What the government cannot do is refuse to grant you the necessary permit because they don't like what they think you will be saying. The owners, administrators, and moderators of an internet forum focused on science face a dilemma: Do they take an open or closed stance regarding fringe/nonstandard/completely whacked science? Both sides of the dilemma have advantages and disadvantages. The closed stand risks missing the boat on what truly is a major scientific breakthrough but has a much greater chance of having real discussions of science. The open stance risks having all energy going into arguing over nonsense, with no real discussion of science, but allows the possibility of a major breakthrough being discussed at their site. Freedom of speech, or lack thereof, is not an issue. Almost all sites quickly and quietly delete posts that tell people where to buy knockoff designer handbags or pills that can enhance your virility. Regarding the deletion of posts: I would prefer it if there was a whole lot more deletion of nonsense posts and banning of crackpots at this site. Almost all energy at this site goes into arguing over nonsense, leaving very little room for real discussion of science. However, since I am not the owner of this site, my desires for stronger moderation are not satisfied here. To see my desires realized, I would need to either start my own forum or go to another that better suits me. I do the latter. My posting rate is considerably lower at this site than it is elsewhere.

Citation needed. There are legal issues related to websites such as this. For example, the Maldives Scuba Diving, Pvt. LTD et al v. Intermedia Publications, Inc. et al lawsuit and the actions by Righthaven, LLC. Both of these can only force forum owners and moderators to be even more vigilant over what is posted on their forums. A person who writes a letter to a newspaper editor has no right to expect that that letter will be printed. It is the newspaper owners, not the letter write, who has the freedom of speech. There is only one way to ensure one's words will be printed in a newspaper: Start your own newspaper. The exact same situation arises at forums such as this. Members at forums such as this have do not have they freedom to post as they wish. The only people who truly do have freedom of speech at this site are the owners. You want freedom of speech? Start your own website. The issue of freedom of speech would arise if and only if some government made a law that restricted what the owners of a newspaper, or a website, can say.